The Configurations of Hell
by Eliza Provident Martense
Summary: It has been several years since Kirsty's first encounter with Pinhead. This time she wants to unlock the Lament Configuration and join him: permanently. Her friend Rose must search Hell to find Kirsty, but will she succeed or find herself damned as well?
1. Kirsty's Tryst

**The Configurations of Hell**

**Chapter One: Kirsty's Tryst**

Rose had heard Kirsty tell her the story a thousand times – had heard all the details about her father's death, about her uncle Frank Cotton and his manifold depravities, and had learned of Frank's ruthless paramour Julia who had stopped at nothing, not even murder, so that they might be together. They all inhabited her mind like the vague shapes of old, forgotten articles of furniture in some lonely attic, draped in white cloths and solitude, marvellous to look at but somehow never seeming quite real. She had often wondered, ever since the two had begun to live together as college roommates in their last years of graduate school, whether Kirsty had been telling the truth – whether the fantastic horrors that she had spoken of could actually inhabit any sane realm of this universe.

But every time such doubts assailed her, they instantly fled before another, colder logic – the logic of instinct: that the very infamy, the very incredulity that the images in Kirsty's tale conjured in her mind, mingled with the genuine notes of horror that were awakened in her in spite of her second-hand knowledge of these incidents, must surely point to some underlying truth behind the narrative. For what earthly writer of fictions, save one possessed of a mind infused with so brilliant a spark of divine or infernal brilliance that it must have been kindled from the frothing, magma mouth of Pandaemonium's most fiery fount – what mortal mind could have possibly conceived the simple and yet macabre diabolism that lay behind Kirsty's experience? Demons emerge from Ouija boards or from ancient, unearthed tombs – not from harmless puzzle boxes constructed by toymakers in eighteenth-century France. And yet the very improbability of Lemarchand's Box served to bemuse her still further and drive away the ghosts of skepticism that still whispered in her ear. Rose still did not know whether she altogether _believed _Kirsty – but she certainly did not disbelieve her.

Rose was turning all this over in her mind for the umpteenth time whilst peeling the skin off a particularly stubborn onion one October evening when Kirsty returned to their joint apartment, the door slamming with a hearty thump in her wake.

"Look what I brought!" she called, thudding into the kitchen with an armful of brown, paper bags. Rose raised an incredulous eyebrow as Kirsty proceeded to lift out bottle after bottle: first a case of Budweiser cans, then a generous helping of Dogfish Head beers. These were followed by a solid reinforcement of popcorn bags and other hefty examples of what Rose's mother would have called 'get-fat-fast foods'. Now with her hands on her hips, Rose demanded:

"You are aware that it's _Thursday_, right? Or are you just that excited already about Friday night?"

"Oh, come on, Rose," Kirsty said, affecting a whine past the smile that covered her face. "We've both had a rough week and midterms are over now. I think we could both do with a break, don't you?"

Rose was in a quandary. On the one hand, she had a quite hefty novel to finish by Monday – Henry James' _Portrait of a Lady_ to be pedantically exact. On the other hand, she could do with something, anything, to take her mind off of classes, if only for an evening.

"What are you planning?" she said at last.

Kirsty raised her eyes dramatically to the ceiling as though the question required some profound thought. "Hmm, I was thinking maybe…movie night. You, me, beer, and whatever's on AMC."

Rose smiled. "Sounds good to me!"

Several hours later, the two girls were sitting on a couch in front of the battered old television set that Kirsty had salvaged from the wreck of her father's house, watching some rather maudlin black-and-white melodrama starring Vivien Leigh. Kirsty, lulled both by the beer and the movie's meandering plot, had already slipped into a deep slumber whilst Rose herself began to feel her own eyelids begin to droop heavily.

She tried to focus on the screen but soon gave up on this and glanced over at her slumbering companion. Kirsty's hair, usually a curly, auburn mess, was coiffed in a rather attractive half updo, the loose curls of which spilled over her throat, beneath her pale upturned face. Unconsciously, Rose touched the back of her own head of long, blonde hair. She grimaced; it had been several days since she'd had the chance to shampoo. Maybe a shower was in order. She couldn't help but wonder to herself why Kirsty had gone to the trouble of doing her hair when neither of them intended to go out at all that night.

Just as she stood up, however, the lights in the living room flickered and – after a moment of light and silence – gave out completely, leaving her in utter darkness. The television's screen, of course, had zapped off as well. To Rose's surprise, however, the abrupt silence didn't wake Kirsty. If anything else, she seemed to lapse into a more profound slumber than before.

Well, a shower was out of the question. Rose sat back down on the couch, her eyes gradually accustoming themselves to the darkness. Strangely enough, she heard no sound of wind or thunder outside, the usual culprits in cases of power outages. The most disturbing sound she heard was the pounding in her head, thanks to the five beers that she'd downed. Maybe if she lay down and closed her eyes for a bit, the groggy dizziness that filled her brain would dissipate and she could hit the shower afterwards and attend to her long-neglected hair. Without another thought, Rose made a comfortable pile of pillows for herself on the couch and promptly fell asleep.

She must have lain in this stupor for some time, for when she awoke it was pitch-black in that living room. Not even the wan reflection of the nearby streetlights filtered through the windows: her open eyes were dazzled and blinded by the complete purity of that absence of light.

At first she thought it was that purity that made it so difficult for her to breathe, as though that void sought with some sentient instinct to draw its breath from her. However, when she tried to sit up, she found that the pressure that forced her down again was far more solid than the pressing darkness of the lightless living room. About her shoulders, the tight grasp of fingers held her whilst next to her ear she heard the distinct sound of a man's voice whisper, "Shhh…hush now and lie still. Or aren't you uncomfortable, trying to sit up with such a headache?"

There was a peculiarly practiced quality to the voice's cajoling and as he spoke in the darkness, his fingers left her shoulders and began to caress her brow, as gentle as a reverie. They left in their wake a trail of cold dampness that lay upon her forehead like a painted seal.

"Who – " she began, her alcohol-numbed body beginning at last to tremble with something like terror.

He laid a finger instantly upon her lips – its wetness tasted sharp and heady, like salt mixed with something sweetly bitter.

"Kirsty told me all about you," he said. He had now taken her hand in his own and she could feel his lips begin to experimentally run the length of her palm – felt him smile at her every flinch. "I wouldn't be surprised if she tells Them as well."

"Them," she murmured. It was all starting to make a hellish sort of sense, but the alcohol had dulled her mind enough to where she felt less fear and more a dawning curiosity. "The Cenobites?"

"Yes," was the whispered reply. As he spoke, she felt him slip one of her fingers between his lips – felt a moving warmth as his tongue began to caress its length. She tried to withdraw her hand from his grasp, but only succeeded in softly tantalizing the inside of his mouth with her contracting finger.

"Where is Kirsty?" she demanded, her voice shaking. "What has happened to her?"

"Nothing that she didn't want herself," the man replied. "Do you know," he added in a rather conspiratorial tone. "I think she fancies one of those creatures. Sick, isn't it?"

The gloating delight with which he made this last pronouncement somehow aroused a vague memory in her – something or someone that Kirsty had described to her long ago.

"I suppose," she said, a bit caustically. "That you would know?"

"Of course," he said. "I'm her uncle, after all. Pity."

It was then that she jolted awake, but by that time he had long since disappeared. She called and called for Kirsty, but there was no sign of her – no sign that the Cenobites had come and departed with her. It was this alone that convinced her that her conversation with Frank Cotton had been more than a dream: this and the blood stains that trailed across her forehead and along her palm and finger, leaving their crimson trail of whetted lust…


	2. The Thing on the Pillar

**Chapter Two: The Thing on the Pillar**

**Author's Note: **A thousand thanks to those who have followed the story thus far. Enjoy this latest installment and please don't forget to review! ^_^**  
**

When Rose awoke the second time, she found herself lying on the floor of the apartment bathroom. She must have fainted after catching sight of her blood-spattered reflection in the mirror. Rising unsteadily to her feet, she turned on the tub's faucet and began to lave the running water all over her hands and arms, trying hard to put out of her mind the means by which these bloody strokes had been drawn. Frank was gone, she supposed, back to whatever Hell he had emerged from and for that she was grateful – but Kirsty was gone as well and if she was in the same dimension that her uncle had, for a moment, escaped from…Rose shuddered and put that idea out of her mind as well.

She had just been about to take her shirt off and scrub her chest clean when she happened to catch sight of herself in the mirror once again. The patterns of blood were scrambled by the reflection, but something about the stains on her left hand appeared different from the formless streaks that the mangled creature had left elsewhere. She held her hand up, examined it. The words were there and, for all the unsteadiness of the finger, plain as print: SAVE ME.

Rose stood and put her shirt back on. So Frank wanted her to save him from his tormenting captors, the Cenobites. Well, her first order of business was to find Kirsty. If anyone wanted to tag along, that was none of her concern – but considering Uncle Frank's track record, she decided it would be wisest to let Kirsty make the final decision rather than trust in the rather dubious likelihood of his having experienced a change of heart. His stint with the Cenobites had likely done more for his sense of desperation and self-preservation than for his moral development.

She headed out of the bathroom and towards the door of her apartment, but before she crossed the room, she paused before the living room window and peeked past the blinds. All she could see was a roiling mist outside; a cloud of darkness pressed close to the windowpanes like a hot cheek cooling against the side of a glass, leaving droplets of black sweat in its wake. So thick was this fog, that it was quite impossible to discern the street below, save for the electric lights which shone like the bleary eyes of unblinking sea creatures amidst the midnight stillness. Shivering, Rose turned away from the window and headed out of the apartment altogether.

With any luck, this was only a nightmare and she would wake up in a moment with nothing more grotesque than a mess of popcorn to clean from the carpet.

* * *

Kirsty's first awakening to consciousness came from the rhythmic sound of human breathing somewhere close by. She opened her eyes and blinked in the murky darkness that surrounded her, only broken by the jagged rays of grey light that fell from somewhere above. Raising her eyes, she looked but could see no source for that luminance – only a ceiling of starless night broken at various intervals by rotating pillars of stone and wood. A moving forest of blood-spattered machinery, they turned in endless revolutions to the music of their own grating, their silent trophies of flesh and bone flaunted upon the ends of embedded iron spikes.

Slowly, she stood, her breath catching in her throat as she happened to glance down and see the carpet of still-twitching muscle, skin, and broken bone that blanketed the wooden floorboards beneath her feet. Controlling with a Herculean effort the surge of nausea that for a moment engulphed her, Kirsty looked about for some opening – anything – by which she could escape this temple of suffering and find her way again into the world of light and humanity. Nothing met her eye save the endless turning of the torture pillars and their ragged burdens.

_"Kirsty." _The whisper had the rough sibilance of a throttled serpent but something in its tenor still struck her as eerily familiar. When she turned, she at first saw nothing. It was only when one of the pillars close beside her completed its endless revolution once more that she saw the thing bound to one of its four faces, its eyes fixed upon her with a look of baleful remembrance.

It was Frank Cotton, or what little was left after the tortuous intimacies that his flesh had undergone. Wires, like barbed, lascivious fingers, entwined and held his limbs tightly bound, while blood from myriad lacerations upon his back laced the marble of the pillar in thin, trickling rivulets. But that was not what held Kirsty's gaze: her eyes were fixed instead upon the immense iron nails driven through his arms, his legs, his throat, and his chest. In spite of his nails and blood, there was nothing Christ-like in his appearance: rather, he was a crucified Satan, mocking the nature of his suffering whilst deriving neither regret nor a purging salvation of sorts from his torments. With a soul changeless and implacable in its fundamental mould of eternal, desperate desire, only his nerves had stretched and learnt new limits for their capacity to sustain the pleasures and tortures visited upon him by the Cenobites. His heart, beneath the flesh, remained still the black, swallowing fastness that had sat within his breast long before Kirsty's birth. Transfixed and _in extremis_, he still lived to look upon her with that same countenance of remorseless amusement that had been her last glimpse of him before the Cenobites had taken him away. Yet, perhaps due to the passage of time since their last meeting, Kirsty felt a pity for the wretched thing before her – a pity that, at their last meeting, she had been entirely unable to conjure for her uncle before: perhaps it was the look of frozen suffering that time had branded upon his brow, or perhaps it was the empathy of experience that the years had branded on hers. Regardless, she asked him then the question that she had asked in dreams for so long:

"Frank – where is my father?"

His eyes shone bright with envy at this witness of a devotion that he had never enjoyed or, as even he would have admitted freely, merited. Then, with a bloodied finger that lifted only with the greatest of difficulty, he pointed upwards.

"Then he's not here?" She almost choked on the tears of relief that welled at the back of her throat.

"Take me down," he whispered. "Take me down and I can tell you where he is."

She hesitated, knowing all that Frank was capable of and wondering how wise allowing him freedom would be. But her curiosity was too great to sustain such considerations for long. Groping to get a fingerhold on the barbed wire, slimy with blood, she tried to work out the nails that transfixed his arms.

A movement from somewhere beyond the moving pillar upon which Frank was bound brought her attention momentarily from her labours. Then she saw them: four spirits emerging behind the seemingly impenetrable wall of shadow that encompassed that world of darkness. They were approaching her with an alacrity that astonished, for their movements were serene and unhurried – yet even as she watched, her heart bursting with dread and anticipation, she saw their features begin to show beneath the murky light that shone from somewhere above: saw the features of that particular Cenobite whose pale face was transfixed so precisely with pins of the purest silver.

"Child," he said, his voice the substance of her nightmares for the last five years. "You have come home."

**Coming soon: **A deserted mansion on top of Tempest Mountain, an unspeakable love, Hell on Earth, and much more!

**_Don't forget to review - and thanks for reading!_**


	3. A Reunion in Hell

**Chapter Three**

Frank watched as the high regent of the Cenobites, the leader (or so he had always presumed) of the peculiar body of governance that reigned this dark dimension, approached Kirsty, before the turning pillar on which he hung brought him out of view. Every nerve in every limb of his flayed and abused flesh groaned under the agony not only of the piercing shafts that transfixed him but also of the relentless motion of the pillar as it continued its mindless revolution, rocking his dizzied senses still further. But in spite of all this, he strained his ears to catch the next word that would fall from the little drama that was taking place so close by him and, as he waited impatiently for his next glimpse of Kirsty and her unexpected audience, he felt a glimmer of curiosity once again burgeon like some fiery blossom deep at the heart of his disfigured breast. Curiosity! He could have spat at the hateful sentiment. Had it not been Curiosity (along with Desire, of course, his second deity) that had brought him to this pass? Had it not been his wish to go farther, to learn what indeed were the limits (if any) that the universe imposed upon sensual experience, that had led to his acquaintance with horrors and delights (or so his torturers termed them) that would have left most souls dry, gibbering husks of their former selves? Yet he continued to wait, and watch, and listen, and feed his hungry eyes and implacable Curiosity: true, it had been his ruin, but was it not all he had left, save his own tattered memories, in all the world?

"Keep away," Kirsty was saying now, her eyes fixed upon the grisly, statuesque beings that approached her.

Frank saw their leader pause before her, his gaze lingering upon her defiant eyes and trembling mouth.

"Oh, you cannot be thinking of fleeing us again, can you?" he enquired. "Surely not."

"Why else did you return to us," the female of that pale assembly added, the hoarse sibilance of her voice touching the ear like a serpentine caress. "If it were not that you grew envious for your own share of the pleasures that Frank Cotton has enjoyed with us."

"You don't understand – " Kirsty began.

"Perhaps it is you who did not understand," their leader (whom Frank had come to think of as 'Pinhead,' knowing no other name by which to call him) continued, his voice rising above her own. "When you chose to open the Lamerchand Box a second time."

Frank might have laughed had he not been transfixed with astonishment at this newest revelation. Kirsty – unlocking the Lament Configuration and entering this dimension of her own free will? Considering the fact that she had betrayed him to the Cenobites precisely so that she might escape them, this new development held an irony that he had not expected.

"I knew exactly what I was doing," Kirsty shot back. "Saving my father." As Pinhead's countenance took on a quizzical look, she continued, "He's visited me in my dreams – for the last several months, I've had nothing but a series of nightmares: visions of him warning me about something and then vanishing before I can find him." Her voice was trembling now as tears built and brightened in her eyes. "So I opened the box and came here, because I need to know: do you have my father here?"

His expression did not alter in the slightest degree as he shook his head, but his pallid fingers lifted to brush her cheek. "Why these wasted tears?" he pressed, his voice too low to be discerned as either mocking or tender. "Your father is not amongst us. Instead, here you are. Is this not a cause for rejoicing?"

Kirsty stumbled back, her eyes wide. "Don't touch me," she whispered.

_Oh, they'll do more than touch you, my sweet_, thought Frank. His own flesh was a grim enough testimony of that. Even now, she was fumbling for the puzzlebox that she had kept hidden in her sweater. Swifter than thought, the chains flew out of the darkness and fastened upon the golden box, sending it hurtling away out of sight.

Now visibly shaken, Kirsty took to her heels and ran in the opposite direction of the Cenobites, only to find herself run straight into the arms of the high regent of them all. This unexpected proximity left her frozen with terror for several moments, her face against the cold leather of his garments. She expected every second the first groping prick of a tenterhook at her back – when this never came, she ventured a glance at the countenance of her would-be tormentor. His visage, leprous white, held the same look of distant remove that ever distinguished him even when regarding those most exquisite moments of agony that his victims suffered.

"Please," she said. "Let me go and I'll never open the box again."

"What has been done," he replied. "Cannot be undone so easily. Nor is the puzzle of the Lament Configuration so easily unriddled save by one who already craves the joys it locks away. You, child," he said, after a pause. "Are such a one."

"_No_." Kirsty broke away from his grasp, breathing hard. Why didn't he just take her with his chains and hooks and get it over with? Why this poisonous toying, this insistence that some part of her soul actually desired such hellish congress? Frank as well, was beginning to wonder at the peculiar nature of Pinhead's intercourse with Kirsty: their interaction, with its rhythm of denial and affirmation, retreat and pursuit, reminded him of the familiar pattern of courtship. Frank allowed himself a smile, albeit a ghastly one, at this realization: that was one chase that he had possessed some skill in, God help him, when alive.

Meanwhile, Pinhead stepped towards Kirsty and, before she could shrink away, took her by the throat with one hand, the other entwined in her hair so that her face was raised to his.

"What about – Channard?" Kirsty demanded. She was fighting to remain calm, fighting to find some way to escape the consequences of her terrible mistake, even as she felt the Chatterer catching her arms and holding them fast whilst Pinhead leaned closer – his breath like a winter's draft upon her lips.

"What about Channard, child?"

"He didn't open the box himself," she whispered. "And yet he must have been worthy or else he wouldn't have become one of your group."

The Cenobite's contempt proved as chilling as his caresses. "Channard was an ambitious fool who hardly understood what it was that he searched for in the midst of his hungry grasping for power. As you will remember, he barely lasted a moment in our world, even as a monster. Frank Cotton, on the other hand, sought us because he had wearied of the limited joys that your world had to offer. In despair, he fled to us as angels and so have you. And, child, we shall serve you as faithfully as he – a fount ever flowing and a thirst ever quenchless for all eternity!"

As he spoke, he released his hold upon her throat and brought his hand beneath her chin, forcing her gaze to meet his.

"You can't do this," she whispered, knowing full well that he not only _could_, but in only moments _would_ have done all that he promised.

Then, without warning, he brought his lips to hers. She felt the shock of his silver pins against her mouth, not as the ordinary piercing of metal through flesh as she would have expected, but rather as a searing ice that transfixed her through and through so that her tongue lost all feeling save for the cold, sharp sting as of winter on her tongue. She attempted to resist, to pull away from the searing pain that threatened to numb her lips and steal her breath away. But even as the Chatterer's hold about her began to loosen, she felt herself lifted clear of the ground, made helpless as a child by the grasp that her implacable captor had about her waist. Disoriented, she instinctively put her arms about his shoulders, her cheeks burning at the unexpected thrill that coursed through her senses as she realized that she was entirely under his power now – there was no escaping the hold that he had upon her now, nor the implacability of the caressing fingers that she found herself submitting to in spite of her terror. Or was it because of the terror? What was it that Frank had said so many years ago?—something about certain horrors having to be endured before the sweetness in them could be fully realized? Had what he spoken up in that dusty attic actually been the truth?

She might have unravelled the mystery, then, had not her senses – overcome as they were by both terror and anticipation – at last fled her to take refuge in the only place that could offer sanctuary in such straits: oblivion. As a result, with the suddenness of a child falling asleep, she fainted utterly away in Pinhead's arms.

_**Thanks for reading - and don't forget to review!**_


	4. A Reunion of a Different Kind

**Chapter Four**

**Author's Note: **Thanks to all of you readers and to my dear friend Laura 101 who troubled to boost this little tale with your encouragement - this next chapter is all for you guys! ;)**  
**

_For he who has not folded in his arms_

_A skeleton, nor fed on graveyard charms,_

_Recks not of furbelow, or paint, or scent,_

_When Horror comes the way that Beauty went._

_O irresistible, with fleshless face,_

_Say to these dancers in their dazzled race:_

_"Proud lovers with the paint above your bones,_

_Ye shall taste death, musk scented skeletons!"_

**_- from Baudelaire's "Dance of Death"_**

The woman watched as the Cenobites, at the behest of their leader, took up the limp burden of Kirsty in their arms and disappeared into some unknown region of the labyrinth out of sight. Then, the white train of her dress trailing behind her, she wandered out amongst the torture pillars, her eyes roaming with a glittering interest as though she were in search of something in that wilderness besides the moving shadows of suffering that surrounded her.

Frank Cotton still remained where Kirsty had found him, nailed to that agonizing column with his gaze now fixed upon the hanging chains that surrounded him, his gaze that of a child confronted with a lesson that has been learnt by rote and yet still remains a puzzlement: a dazzling riddle meant to be solved and yet somehow, maddeningly, just beyond his questing grasp. Only the movement that he sensed somewhere below him brought his transfixed gaze down to the face of the woman who stood looking up at him, her lips curved in a smile of ironic remembrance.

"Frank," she said, her voice soft above the grating of the blood-stained machinery all about her.

Somehow he managed to let the word escape, past his torn lips: "Julia."

He loathed to be seen by her like this. Shame he had never felt – could never feel. That peculiar subtlety of human emotion he had banished from his soul long ago, past all recall. But in its place, there had grown in him a new sensitivity to the whispering tendrils of regret and even a tenderness to remorse, two anguishes that had never forced entry into his being before and yet which now at times quivered in him like the roots of famished blossoms beneath the twin gods of Curiosity and Desire that still possessed the thralldom of his soul. It was as though the continuous invasions that the Cenobites had wrought upon his flesh for a small eternity had resulted in the seams of his soul coming undone as well, allowing for the tentative entrance of emotions that had never assaulted him in life. They were mingled with that same odd sense of spirituality – half blasphemous, half reluctantly genuine – that had prompted him to decorate his home with religious icons (in the hopes that they might offer some protection from the occult forces that the Lemarchand Box would summon) and had also inspired those final, chilling words that had fallen from his lips before he had dissolved into a chaos of laughing blood and flesh, spilling and fragmenting in that attic as Kirsty ran, fleeing for the sanity of the outer world. He supposed that it was somehow a cruel sense of irony that had inspired that implacable head regent of the Cenobites to choose as his final fate the agony of transfixion: riveted through every limb and pierced severally in the left breast by nails and iron spikes so that he seemed a living effigy of the martyr St. Sebastian, clumsily crucified with arrows. His body was also twisted and bound with manifold ropes of barbed wires and chains that at once supported and tortured his wearied frame.

Watching Julia's gaze as it traced the rivulets that ran upon his bloodied flesh, a part of his soul that did not mock now cursed the resemblance – however passing – between himself and any martyr. Even to his jaded sensibilities, there seemed something repulsive in any connection, however tenuous, between his state and that of theirs. And yet, thought he, flawed and imperfect as I am in terms of saintliness, do I not possess the same contempt for the earthly world that they had? Was I not seeking after a vision as well? Like his torn flesh, his soul was rent by both a loathing for his state and a curious sense of exaltedness that suffused his being – an ascendancy of spirit that he had never experienced nor ever would have known had he not solved the Lament Configuration. A satanic Prometheus, his torch of implacable desire for something beyond the provincial realms of experience still served to alternately warm him with its imaginative, anticipating heat and to scorch his already blackened soul with its cruel, relentless longing for more.

Frank should not have troubled himself over Julia's reaction to his state, however: the spiritual conflict that harrowed up his brain laid no siege upon her own. She saw only the man whom she had loved and killed for, the man who had despised her devotion and whom she had, in turn, revenged herself upon, now gutted upon hanging hooks and iron poles, entirely at her mercy. She saw only opportunity. What that opportunity would avail her, of course, was up to her own inclinations: but whatever it was that would ultimately be chosen, she was resolved that it should be bled, milked, and drained to its limits.

"I have something here that I believe belongs to you," she said. In her hand, something like a black fruit throbbed and Frank recognised it as his own heart.

"Why, sentimental are we?" he said, that familiar, half-tender sneer of his surfacing to conceal the amused incredulity that actually affected him. "Saving other people's hearts for them?"

Again, that wry smile of hers. Then, without another word, she began to slowly draw out the stakes that held him fixed to the pillar, and unwound the chains that clasped him to the marble until at last he fell into her arms, weltering in his own blood.

"Christ," he murmured, lifting a hand to touch the perfection of her high cheek. "They haven't touched you at all."

She attempted a smile, though her heart quickened under the pressure of his flayed fingertips. This wasn't the way it was supposed to go – here, _she _was supposed to take him; _she _was supposed to tell him that her will was his to follow and force love from him in exchange for his freedom. That was how she had planned it, all those years that she had spent in the solitary corridors of the Labyrinth, hidden from the sight of the Cenobites and their tortured victims. Instead, in spite of his bloodied state, here he was: once again holding her, again caressing her with that artful finesse of his that at once satisfied and whetted her desires, again regarding her with that cold, steady gaze.

"Am I a monster again, Julia?" he asked. "Tell me, am I?"

"You were never a monster, Frank," she said.

He laughed at this. "I knew there was a reason why I loved you."

"Loved? Did you, really?" she returned with a caustic smile.

He made no answer. In truth, he could not tell himself – and the last decade that he had suffered in the Labyrinth had done little to clarify his understanding of what he felt for the steel-eyed beauty whom his brother had married and who inexplicably preferred his attentions. All he knew was that a sudden weariness now had overcome him and, against his will, he faltered in her arms, feeling suddenly unsure of whether his flayed limbs could support his bleeding body. She lowered him to the ground, kneeling before him and running her fingers through his blood-stained hair as though to caress some life into that lifeless visage.

"I have you – God help me, I still have you," he whispered then.

She smiled and there was a triumph now in her lips, though he did not see it. All the suffering that his betrayal had cost her heart, all the humiliations that she had undergone for his sake, seemed as nothing in light of this revelation forced out of his tortured lips: that some splinter of that damned, inhuman heart, in spite of itself, cared for her – felt the extent of her desire and was awed before it. Whether Frank Cotton ever admitted it or not, she realised, he needed her – was as dependent on her obsessive loyalty as he was upon his own obsessive pursuit after some unearthly, unattainable goal. Armed with this knowledge, she felt a new, heady strength course through her and without even the faintest hint of repulsion, pressed her lips to his bloodied mouth.

A jolt of pain at first went through him, for his nerves yet throbbed close to his flayed skin, but even as he sought to resist, another sensation began to spread throughout his taut senses – the familiar, irresistible rhythm of desire that he was powerless to suppress. Her searching tongue within his mouth, though it stung the sensitive flesh within, somehow caressed the tender spaces there as well in such a way that he hardly felt the pain, so implacable was the pleasure. His own wounded fingers left trails of crimson affection upon the bare skin of her back and the white of her dress, while his senses panted for the company of her lips against his ravaged throat and pale, rotting breast. Death-like as his appearance might be, his soul was yet as alive and desirous as ever: and the next several moments left ample proofs of this truth upon both of the lovers. At last, more wearied than sated, they agreed to a truce for the nonce and Julia, leaning in his arms, remarked:

"I saw them take that little niece of yours off – though God knows where."

Again, Frank recalled the rather peculiar altercation between Pinhead and Kirsty and the unexpected kiss at its closing.

"That little cheat is only enjoying what she deserves," he said. "God knows, she can do me no more harm than I've already suffered, thanks to her meddling. Perhaps she'll taste a portion of what her cleverness delivered me up to all these years."

"True enough, but we are still as trapped as her," Julia reminded him.

"The boundaries of this world are queer," Frank replied. "Only an hour or so before, I could have sworn that I saw a girl close to Kirsty's age, asleep in a bedroom. It felt so lifelike, I half-believed that I'd escaped. At the same time, in my vision, I saw Kirsty pass from Earth to this dimension and knew somehow that she had solved the Lament Configuration once again. When my vision faded, I found myself again here and thought I'd dreamt the whole thing up. But then I saw that Kirsty in fact _was _here and now…"

"Now what?" Julia pressed.

The flayed thing at her side shrugged. "Something's happening on the outside – something on Earth. Someone's meddling with something he shouldn't, I'd expect. And it's interfering with the walls of the Labyrinth, breaking them down and rebuilding them again."

"What does this mean for us?"

"Perhaps nothing," he said. "Perhaps nothing at all. Or perhaps that we may have found ourselves a chance to escape this realm, good and proper. For the last time."

"And Kirsty?" Julia prodded with a half-smile.

"Leave her to our host," Frank advised. "They've only just become acquainted, haven't they?"

He leaned over her, then, to claim another kiss but she said, "Frank, before I forget - there's something I meant to return to you."

And, with a telling look, she pressed what had once been his heart into his fingers.

"Can you ever forgive me for stealing it before?" she enquired then, tongue-in-cheek.

"I'm certain," he said with a dark glimmer in his eye. "That it was nothing personal."

**Coming soon: **Kirsty entrapped in the Labyrinth, Rose's desperate attempt to find her, Frank and Julia's sinister machinations, Pinhead's ambiguous intentions, and much more...


	5. A Search Amongst the Stacks

**Chapter Five**

**Author's note: **As always, thanks to all my readers for the undeservedly generous responses that you all have left for me! I do hope that you all enjoy the next installment and shall look forward to whatever words of encouragement or suggestion you all have to offer. In the meantime, thanks for reading! ^_^**  
**

"Shit."

Rose slumped back in the swivel chair, feeling singularly helpless and frustrated. She had been spending the last several hours in the library of Shrewsfield University searching for any article at all pertaining to the mysterious deaths of Larry Cotton and his wife as well as the similarly inexplicable disappearance of his brother Frank Cotton several months preceding. The newspaper articles were useless; their dry, barebones interpretations of events not only boring her to tears but revealing precious little that she did not already know. The psychiatric transcripts from Channard's office were a bit more interesting, containing as they did Kirsty's first account of what had happened in that house that fateful night, but even they spared only the barest essentials of what had to be divulged to the authorities, leaving the rest veiled behind the sanctity of a patient's privacy. After an exhaustive search, all Rose had managed to turn up amounted to less than what Kirsty herself had confided to her all those years ago. It was hopeless; she would never find a clue here as to how Kirsty could possibly have been forced into the dimension of the Cenobites.

She happened to glance up and caught the eye of one of the librarians, a tall lady who had been scrutinizing Rose's bloody shirt and generally unkempt appearance with an expression of disapproval now bordering on shock. Under normal circumstances, Rose adored librarians. But these were times that tried men's souls – literally. Not to mention, Rose still had not entirely made her mind up as to whether she was dreaming these events or not. So she satisfied herself with a brattish glare and continued her survey of the library's online archives, her eyes slowly glazing as they travelled across the computer screen.

Another several hours (it was now bordering on five o'clock in the morning by this time) brought Rose at last to reality. Jerking awake, she realised with some embarrassment that she had fallen asleep in front of the computer, the last article that she had pulled up on the Cotton case still flickering on the screen in front of her. She stumbled to her feet and began to head for the stairs, trying with difficulty to blink back the tears of disappointment and exhaustion that threatened to brim over. It had been foolish to think that any clue could be found in so absurd a place as a university library. Kirsty was lost – lost to the world forever. And there was nothing that she could do about it.

Even as this sickening realisation began to take hold within her heart, the overhead lights in the library's study hall began to flicker and dim. For a moment they held steady. Then, with a quiet resolution, they chose abruptly to die.

The Shrewsfield University Library, though its contents were unextraordinary, was architecturally rather unique. Even under ideal conditions, one could easily lose oneself amongst the high, vaulted passages that led from one subdivision of shelves to another. Secreted away at certain intervals amongst these alcoves, 'study stations' as they were called had been set up: little rooms, often rented by graduate students or particularly solitary professors who preferred the scurrying of the library's rat population to the sounds of humanity. As a result, while Rose tried to regain her sense of direction and discern in which way the staircase leading to the main floor of the library was situated, she began to lose herself deeper and deeper amongst the stacks, her hands feeling only the protruding steel of the doorknobs leading into the various study stations.

As she paused, her eyes still unused to the deep darkness into which the library had been plunged, she heard one of these doorknobs turn and was startled by the sudden flash of light that dazzled her eyes as the door of one such private office opened.

"The lights are still out?"

The voice was male and, as Rose's eyes adjusted to the brilliance of the electric torch that was shining in her eyes, she saw a young man with a face, lean and curious like a horse's, standing at the entrance to the office door. He was blinking his small eyes rather rapidly at her and before she could reply, she heard an older man's voice from somewhere within the study station bark, "Who's out there? Who are you talking to?"

"Just a student, grandfather," the horse-faced young man said, but a shadow was already darkening the doorway of the office and Rose found herself staring at an old man, his chin covered with the same white locks that covered his head in an unkempt arrangement.

"Who are you, girl?" he demanded, scrutinizing her with an eyes of wintry blue.

Before Rose could snap an appropriate comeback, the young man spoke up:

"Grandfather! If you keep treating the students and faculty around here like trash, they're bound to kick you out, you know."

The old man allowed a surly, grudging smile to cross his face, then. "Maybe so. Apologies, Miss…"

"St. Aubert. Rose St. Aubert," Rose said, rather brusquely. "Listen, sir, I hate to be a bother but the lights have gone out as you can see and…" Her voice trailed off as she happened to catch a glimpse of the brightly-lit interior of the old man's office. "…And you apparently have an emergency lighting system?"

The elderly stranger nodded, taking no apparent notice of her surprise. "There are so many blackouts here in Shrewsfield, thanks to the autumn storms, that I thought it most expedient to have a secondary power source so that I could continue my work uninterrupted."

"Do you think that I could perhaps borrow an electric torch or something to find my way out of here?" Rose asked.

The old man and the young one exchanged glances, their long faces making them seem very much like a gruff old goat and his youngster debating whether or not to move to more profitable grazing grounds. Finally, the elderly gentleman replied:

"I suspect that the power will return shortly. In the meantime, neither my grandson nor I can be interrupted from our work." After a pause: "Why don't you sit here in my office until then? If it suits you."

Rose was too exhausted to argue; otherwise, she would probably have rejected the old man's offer and continued to grope for the exit herself. As it was, she followed the two of them into the cramped confines of the study station and sat in the swivel chair proffered to her without further question. Her eyes wandered to the narrow shelves that made up the walls of that room and without even thinking she began to analyse their titles. _The Complete Works of the Marquis de Sade_, Baudelaire's infamous _Flowers of Evil_, a collection of Aleister Crowley's books on black sorcery – these were but a few of the dubious volumes that adorned that studious little cell. Pictures as well, mostly photocopies from various books, were taped to the walls: Rose recognised Dore's illustrations of Milton's Hell from nineteenth-century editions of _Paradise Lost_ as well as medieval depictions of various devices of suffering such as the Iron Maiden and the rack. Then her eyes widened. For there was also a picture of…

_"This." _She jabbed her finger at one of the taped pictures on the wall. "What do you know about this?"

The elderly man followed her pointing finger, his gaze resting upon the 18th century woodcut of a small puzzlebox. "Ah, yes – the fabled puzzlebox of Monsieur LaMarchand. You have heard of it, perhaps?"

"Yes," Rose replied.

"And how, might I ask?" For the first time, his tone contained something more than dry irritation. A gleam of actual interest suffused his narrow eyes and he leaned forward, disregarding the look of discomfort upon Rose's countenance.

"Because…" She drew a deep breath, struggling to keep control of herself. "Because I think that my friend might have opened one and trapped herself with those beings – the Cenobites, I think she called them."

She awaited the inevitable, paternal laugh of dismissal. Instead, the old man sharply enquired:

"Who is your friend?"

"Why, Kirsty Cotton…" Rose began.

"Indeed!" The elderly man clapped his hands sharply, causing even his sleepy-eyed grandson to straighten and stand to attention. "Did you hear that?" he enquired of the youth. "So Kirsty Cotton is in Hell again, is she? And why did she go there again, miss?"

"That's not the point, is it?" Rose snapped. "The point is that we have to free her somehow. And how do you know about Kirsty?"

"I have been researching the Cotton family for the last year or so," he replied, entirely nonplussed by her outburst. "And doing my own experimentations with the various access-ways to the dimension that Frank Cotton gained entry to."

"You mean there are other ways to reach that place?" Rose asked. "Besides the Lemarchand Box."

"I believe so," said he. "But your friend…you say that she solved the Lament Configuration herself?"

Rose nodded.

"Well, then…" he paused, letting the words hang helplessly for a moment. "I am very sorry to say this, but the likelihood of reclaiming your friend is miniscule at best. For I must confess, Miss St. Aubert, in all my researches, I have never heard of a person who has opened the box willingly ever escaping to this world again."

He paused, suddenly recalling Frank.

"Or at least," he amended. "Not for long."

* * *

Even as Rose was gazing on the stranger's face in disbelief, worlds away in the realm of which Lemarchand's Box was but one entryway to, Frank Cotton and his paramour wandered through the hallways of Hell, seeking new flesh.

"I still possess the remnants of my brother's skin," Frank said, catching a glimpse of his face in a lake of blood that pooled at the base of one particularly grisly torture pillar. "As well as his voice – it would seem that those lungs of his were hardy enough to withstand even _their _hooks. But I'm still a mess. I _must _patch myself together as much as possible, before we take our leave of this place at last."

"Of course." Julia pressed his hand, upon which a few shreds of warm flesh still remained. "But, darling, let me search for you. Rest here," she gestured to a secluded alcove. "And I shall return presently."

"Don't let them catch you," he said, his eyes fixed upon hers. "I can't do without you. I'm at your feet again, remember, until I regain something of my old strength."

"I remember," she said, again clasping his hand. Oh, how she loved him like this, with that look of wary hope mingled with mistrust as he watched her go. They were Larry's old features that were watching her – but Larry had never possessed such a wealth of expression as was now contained behind that bloodied flesh. In Larry, there had always been the simple emotions, easily read: love, anger, frustration – and, increasingly towards the end, despair. Here, the full gallery of human agonies and anticipations was revealed: cruelty, desperation, helplessness, lust, longing, a calculating craft, and (as in his brother) a brooding melancholy all bound up within one visage that, above all, held a look that threatened her with an awful retribution should she betray his trust. She felt no qualms in leaving him to fetch the required sacrifice of flesh – he would never leave her in this state. Nor would he _ever _leave her again: of that, she would make certain.

Once Julia was out of sight, Frank allowed himself to lean against the wall, resting his ragged frame against the high stone columns and straining his ear to catch the faintest hint of the approaching step of a torturer. Only the distant grind of those familiar, gory pillars could be heard, however. He expelled a sigh of relief, forcing his mind to focus upon the thought of Julia, _his _Julia, searching for the scraps of flesh that would somewhat restore him to an outward semblance of humanity. The devotion, the burning lust that she felt for him were overpowering and incited within his own senses a corresponding heat, but he was far too cynical to suppose that it were any virtue of his that aroused these emotions in her. The woman little knew his mind, had barely known his flesh. Perhaps it was the mystery in him, he reasoned; that sense of the theatrical that he had always possessed and that had always distinguished him from his more conventional brother that had caused her imagination to settle upon him as a worthy lover. But more than likely not; he supposed that ultimately, he was no more than a door of escape for Julia – a midnight carriage that promised freedom and pleasures, unbounded by the constraints usually imposed upon earthbound mortals. In a sense, he was her own Lemarchand Box. Only time would tell, however, if this pessimistic assessment of his lover's motivations was indeed the truth.

A sound from somewhere at his back caused him to turn his attention to a high gate of black grating that divided one area of the Labyrinth from another. Curious, in spite of the dangers that this curiosity might incur, he approached that gate and began to listen and watch for whatever it was that he had heard…

* * *

Slowly, Kirsty began to awaken from the faint that had mercifully taken her out of the power of the Cenobites into the more welcome haven of oblivion. Now, however, as consciousness began to return to her, the horror that she had felt before returned to assail her with a sevenfold power, rendered all the more terrible by the new sensations that she now felt. As her eyes began to blink and open, she found that a black strip of cloth had been tied around her face like a blindfold, effectively hampering her vision. She could feel, though she could not see, the shackles that bound her hands together at the wrists so that she seemed to hang suspended by the arms from some unseen hook, barely able to gain a footing upon the stone floor of her dungeon. Her own breath sounded in that stillness like the rushing ebb and flow of a tide as it echoed upon the walls of whatever oubliette of Hell she had been locked away in. How long would it be, she wondered, before her captors tired of this game and treated her to the same hospitality that Frank Cotton had enjoyed?

The harsh grating of an opening door brought her wandering thoughts swiftly to attention as her blinded senses struggled to ascertain in what direction the sound had come from. It was either directly before or behind her, of that she was certain – little good that it did her peace of mind.

And then that familiar voice, the one that always sent a stroke of terror through her – the voice of that lead Cenobite, the one whom she knew only as Pinhead, murmured from somewhere across that chamber to which she was blind:

"Kirsty Cotton – I trust that I have not allowed you to languish alone too long?"

**Coming soon: **In which Pinhead makes his intentions towards Kirsty slightly less obscure – need I say more? Well, just to make up for the quite cruel cliffhanger I left you all with, I'll add a few more tidbits: the further machinations of Frank and Julia along with the sinister researches conducted by the elderly gentleman whom Rose met in this chapter…a lonely lighthouse upon the coast of Shrewsfield…yes, that mansion on Tempest Mountain that I promised in Chapter Two will appear soon, and much more!


	6. Welcome to the Labyrinth

**Chapter Six**

**Author's note: **A shorter chapter than usual, just because I felt so profoundly guilty not only for leaving you all with such a cliffhanger, but for forsaking Kirsty and Pinhead for so long. Laura-Jane, otherwise known as laura101 and my favourite Hellraiser fanfic writer ever, this one is dedicated to you - hope the wait was worth it!**  
**

"What do you want from me?" Kirsty whispered. The soft approach of his footsteps grew more audible above the sudden, rhythmic music of hanging chains that now filled that chamber. Somewhere close by her ear she heard him reply:

"Only what you desire yourself, child."

"Oh? Wonderful. Then I desire to get out of this place. Right now."

"How amusing. Precisely what Frank Cotton said to us himself – before he was taught better. Is it a family trait, perhaps, this lying? Or is it merely a fatal case of ignorance – ignorance of one's own heart?"

As he spoke, his fingers moved to her left breast, caressing the flesh there with a finesse that bespoke something more than merely a passing desire to arouse. She attempted to draw away as far as her shackles allowed, her cheeks unconsciously burning from the pleasures that his touch evoked in spite of her resistance, but she could not escape the desirous ministrations of her captor. Then he grasped her by the throat and, as he pulled her close, murmured:

"For, child, why else did you solve the Lament Configuration were it not that you craved our company – _my _company? You know as well as I that no soul can decipher that puzzle save one that belongs to this world – this Paradise – this Heaven."

"You're wrong," she whispered. "I love my father – I would do anything to make sure he's safe."

"How touching," the Cenobite mocked. "That is why, I suppose, you did not heed my words when I said that your father was _in his own Hell_ – that there was, child, no use in searching for him here for his steps have never touched this earth."

"But those nightmares – those dreams – "

"Conjured by your own heart and its own myriad desires," his voice returned. "You wished to return to us, but your guilt at this desire was too great. The welfare of your father's soul made a convenient excuse, did it not?"

His voice was at once that of an accuser and an advocate and she did not know how to respond. Was what he spoke the truth? She had felt something very like an unspeakable anticipation as her fingers had touched the hidden springs of the puzzlebox, willing it to open. But hadn't that been due to the anticipation that she had felt for her lost father? Surely it had not been for this world of suffering and forbidden pleasure – she was not so sick as to crave the perverse titillations that Frank Cotton had sought. But (and here her surety faltered) had she not felt something very like a sublime curiosity when in her dreams those torture pillars had arisen and she had glimpsed behind the dense mist that surrounded them the figure of that regent of the damned known as Pinhead, his ebony eyes fixed upon her own with a look that promised suffering – oh, assuredly – but also a bounty of experience beyond all that this tired, paltry world had to offer. For the first time, she had understood something of what her uncle had longed for and obtained, costly though it had proved to him, body and soul. And now, she realised with growing terror, she would drink of the very chalice that he had drained to the dregs. Her own buried desires had condemned her to it.

"You shall not enjoy quite the same fate as Frank Cotton," Pinhead said as though reading her thoughts. "For every soul there is a hidden longing, a secret garden of desire all its own. Yours, child, will be discerned by us in time."

"Not by you," she returned. "Never by you."

Of a sudden, the blindfold that had covered her eyes fell away and she found herself immersed in what seemed like a sudden flood of light – in reality, it was no more than the usual murky luminance that lit the hallways and chambers of the Labyrinth. Her tormentor was standing several feet apart from her, his ebony eyes fastened upon her defiant countenance with an expression as indiscernible and implacable as marble. For the first time, however, she thought that she caught a glimmer of something like fury, something like sorrow in that gaze – but she could not be sure in that uncertain light.

A tolling in the distance like that of some immense, cyclopean bell called his attention for a moment from the girl. He drew away as though intending to depart; then of a sudden, he hesitated and drew closer to her instead, so that he was but a foot away from where she stood chained.

"Would you prefer _their _mercy, perhaps, child – to my own?" he enquired, his gaze barely flickering towards the door of the chamber. She heard the whispers and the moans on the other side and guessed at what lay beyond: the Cenobites and their other victims. Slowly, she shook her head, her face very white.

He stood silent for a long moment as though considering her reply. Then, without a word, his fingers went to the shackles at her wrists and he swiftly unbound her. She began instinctively to shrink away from him, but just as swiftly he caught her by the throat and brought her before him once more.

"It was not freedom that you pleaded for," he chided, his grasp now tightening upon her hair with a cruel implacability. "But this Labyrinth is your home now and you must acquaint yourself with its intricacies. None shall have the authority to lay a finger upon you save myself. I trust that you shall not abuse this authority and wreak havoc in my house?" The glimmer of irony within his otherwise wintry gaze was undeniable.

"Why are you doing this?" Kirsty whispered.

"Have you no gratitude, child? Only more questions?"

The sudden, cold contempt in these words left her speechless. Again, she remembered the grisly tortures that she had made herself forfeit to by solving the Lament Configuration and recalled that her uncle had hardly enjoyed the same respite that she was being allowed. Falteringly, she replied, "I'm sorry."

Was it pity that swayed the impenetrable calm of those eyes, if but for a moment? Kirsty would never know, for as though – impossibly – the Cenobite felt something like unease beneath the grief in her eyes, he lowered his gaze and instead took her hand and brought it to his lips.

"Farewell, Kirsty Cotton," he then said. "A moment's grace to you – until we meet again."

And without another word, he turned and departed, leaving her to make of that wonderland of hooks and hanging flesh what she would.

**Coming soon: **Rose's attempt to find a route into the Labyrinth, Frank's rather unfortunate meeting with a Cenobite, and (of course) more Pinhead and Kirsty. Stay tuned!


	7. The Mysterious Dr Langmore

**Chapter Seven**

Frank had been observing this last encounter between Kirsty and Pinhead through the grating of the gate at which he stood, but the tolling of a distant bell from some unknown region of the Labyrinth called his attention to the approaching sound of footsteps from somewhere behind him. Before he found the chance to withdraw behind the sculptured cornice of a Gothic archway, however, one of two passing Cenobites caught sight of him and paused.

"Frank Cotton." The foremost of the Cenobites spoke his name with a crude leer before turning to glance at the female of the species who stood beside him.

Frank recognised them instantly. They were the only two of his hellish wardens whom he despised more than dreaded. The male one known as Pistonhead who had once been a nightclub owner of a low-class joint known as 'The Boiler Room' now existed as the purest distillation of what he had been in life: a greedy, grasping gullet of thirsting concupiscence whose only object in life was to leech as much pleasure and inflict as much pain as he possibly could with as minimal an amount of effort and imagination as was humanly (or in his case 'inhumanly') possible.

The female, known as Dreamer, was a slightly more poignant creature, having searched in life for a companion who would return her devotions honourably but finding only opportunistic braggarts like Pistonhead's human incarnation, J.P. Monroe. Now, as his daemonic consort, she retained her tendencies towards nymphomania and a pitiful dependency on parasites like Pistonhead whilst losing all of the virtues that she had possessed when human. Though (being more than a casual admirer of the female form himself) Frank could not help but be affected by the voluptuous qualities that the Cenobite possessed, he had seen her work on her victims before and knew that she possessed other qualities as well that excited responses in the flesh other than lust. Nor was he prepared to enjoy these experiences any time soon.

"Aren't you supposed to be suffering or something out there?" the Dreamer breathed, gesturing with one of her ubiquitous cigarettes towards the chamber of torture pillars from which Frank had escaped.

"You're right, baby," Pistonhead replied. "What's Mr. Cotton doing so far from where he belongs, I wonder?"

Frank kept silent as the two began to approach him. His mind was running through all the possible scenarios by which he might possibly effect some sort of escape from the unenviable position that he found himself in, but it was difficult to think clearly with two daemons drawing closer by the second. By the time he had settled upon something halfway bordering upon a plan, Pistonhead had already wrapped his fingers around his throat and was shoving him against the wall.

"Well, what do you know," that most loathsome of Cenobites observed. "Looks like you found yourself some skin to patch yourself up with. Might have to do something about that, eh, Dreamer?"

But Dreamer wasn't listening. Instead, she was gazing as though mesmerized at Frank, her fingers reaching out to brush his cheek.

"Oh, but do we have to do something about it, though?" she pouted. "Flesh is so receptive to touch – more than even flayed muscle sometimes. Isn't it?"

She cocked her head at Frank, her lips expelling a cloud of cigarette smoke as she regarded him. Was she arguing for his preservation or for the implementation of some new torture? Not knowing whether he was agreeing to his own destruction or not, Frank cautiously nodded.

"I was lost," he added, knowing as he said it how weak this excuse must have sounded. His glance shifted from Dreamer to Pistonhead. "You can take me back to the pillars. Please." It crushed his soul to beg for this, but some sixth sense made him certain that even this torment was preferable to the company of these two.

Pistonhead licked his lips and glanced at Dreamer.

"I don't see why not," she said. "But why the hurry?" She had taken her cigarette out and was now staring at its glowing end as though considering a series of unspoken possibilities. Frank had observed the uses that she had put this otherwise innocuous implement to and was not fool enough to expect that he would somehow escape her company unscathed. Instinctively, he readied his nerves for the shock of pain that he knew was coming.

As a result, he was altogether unprepared for the shock of a very different nature that assaulted his senses as the Cenobite leaned in for a kiss.

* * *

"So what you're trying to say to me is that Kirsty's gone – forever?" Rose was shaking, though whether it was from sorrow or anger she could not tell.

For a long moment, silence reigned in that cramped little office. Then:

"But what about Frank?" she burst out. "What about Julia?" As the elderly gentleman stared blankly back at her, she continued, "_They _escaped – all it took was a little blood and they were back. We can get some from the blood bank and then – "

"My dear girl," the aged scholar cut in. "If we knew _where _your friend was at the time when she unlocked the Lament Configuration, then you would be entirely correct. However, it would seem that the only thing that we _can _be sure of is that she was nowhere in your vicinity – otherwise, I assure you that you would not have remained asleep during the aftermath."

Rose nodded slowly, her face pale but set. "So we have to figure out where Kirsty disappeared to while I was asleep."

The old man raised his hands in a helpless gesture. "If such a thing can be done."

Rose stood and glanced out the door of the office. The lights in the library had flickered back to life.

"Time to go, I guess," she said.

"Before you leave, allow me to give you my name and number," the man said, handing Rose a business card. On it was inscribed the name Professor Henry Langmore, Department of English, and a local phone number. "If you do find out anything about your friend, I should be very happy to hear of it."

"Thanks." Before Rose headed out, she paused at the door. "There's just one more thing that I don't understand. If people in this Labyrinth dimension are trapped, like you say, then how do you explain my meeting with Frank Cotton several hours ago?"

Was it something more than mere surprise that flickered for a moment in Langmore's gaze?

"I cannot say," he said at last. The old brusqueness in his voice was back. "Perhaps a dream, nothing more. Now my grandson and I must get back to our researches. If you could excuse us, Ms. St. Aubert? Another time I should very much like to speak with you."

As Rose headed out, however, the grandson of Langmore buttonholed her at the door of the library.

"You must excuse Grandfather," he said. "You deserve far more of an explanation, but you must understand – he is on the verge of a breakthrough in his thesis and hasn't much time for…" his lisping voice trailed off for a moment before he finished with a weak smile, "…other people."

"That's all right," Rose smiled, even though she couldn't imagine how a thesis could be more important than what they had been talking about earlier. Extending her hand, she added, "I don't think I caught your name back in there?"

He shook the tip of one of her fingers, his own digits as moist and limp as dead minnows. "Wilfred Langmore," he said. "See here, Ms. St. Aubert, how would you like to meet me sometime this evening at the Gallowglass Pub? I rather think I know something that might prove of use to you…and Kirsty Cotton."

Rose could hardly believe what she was hearing. "Of use?" she repeated.

"A way to save your friend," he elaborated, managing a smile that presumably was supposed to be taken as one of encouragement but that ended up making his already woebegone features appear even ghastlier than usual. Rose didn't care. She flung her arms around him in a quite spontaneous hug.

"Eight o' clock tonight, then," he said, breathing with difficulty as though he had just suffered a narrow escape from a strangler. "Cheerio."

And he scuttled away to the office from whence he had come.

For the first time since the commencement of all these ghastly events, Rose allowed herself to revel openly in triumph. So there _was _a chance for Kirsty! This was a call for celebration, certainly: but she intended, while toasting herself with a double-scoop vanilla ice cream, to do some heavy reading up on the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, John Milton, and whoever else she remembered glimpsing in the English professor's office. Something told her that there was more to this Dr. Langmore's thesis than an extra credential on his _curriculum vitae_…

* * *

Frank's lips had gone quite numb under the Cenobite's embraces and there seemed no apparent end in sight to her ardent attentions. Blood was now running in gory rivulets from his shoulders and back from where she held him and her tongue kept working at the inside of his mouth as though she still expected to find a struggle in him. He was far from caring what happened to his body at this point, however, so long as they remained where they were – the main thing that troubled him was the idea that the two would lead him away to some remote part of the Labyrinth, out of sight of Pinhead's governing eye. Then, he knew, his sufferings would know no end. Spending a moment, let alone an eternity, with this pair was nauseating enough.

_"Kiss me,"_ she was whispering now, her breath touching his ear, her nails riveting the flesh at the back of his throat. _"Kiss me." _

He looked at the mutilated face before him; the lips half-parted, hungering for his. Where the flesh was not unveiled in folds and held in place by chains, the bloody muscle was exposed like wet leather, revealing intricacies in detail and texture that mere flesh could not have possessed. All this, he observed, offered up for his delectation. Repulsed as he felt by the being before him, a part of him felt a dark curiosity – stronger than any passion that he had felt on Earth – flicker for a moment like a passing shadow within his breast. That unspoken love for the grotesque and the unknown – that elusive delight that had always moved him to crave a more fantastic and sublime sensuality than could be discovered on more earthly planes of existence – came alive like a wicked phoenix within his brain, spreading its sable wings and beckoning him to take to his breast this foulness. But in the end, it was the very fastidious nature of his decadence that undid him: these beings were, after all, only half-Cenobites – the crudity of their human attributes mingled with the grotesque nature of their appearance awakened more revulsion than awful pleasure. Come what will, he could not kiss those lips.

This sign of reluctance forfeited him, of course, to Pistonhead's wrath. The male Cenobite wrenched Frank from Dreamer's grasp, his glistening tongue – barbed with cruel needles – lapping at the air as though in lustful anticipation.

For the second time that hour, Frank readied himself for the first touch of pain.

It never came.

"What is this that I see? Ah, Pistonhead and Dreamer – far from your assigned chambers of torment, I see."

The voice was unmistakable. With heads bowed and submissive, the two Cenobites withdrew from Frank, leaving him exposed fully to the gaze of the lead Cenobite and his hellish men-at-arms.

"And Frank Cotton," Pinhead finished, his voice low with irony. "Lost once again, I see? But not for long. Ah, no, never for long."

**_Thanks for reading and don't forget to review!_**


	8. The Ghost in the Machine

**Chapter Eight**

**Author's Note: **Apologies for the long delay in this next installment; life, in all its myriad forms, has been demanding more and more of my time of late and I have had little opportunity to continue my fictions as a result. However, I do hope that you all enjoy this new chapter and hopefully in the future I shall have more time to continue it at a less erratic pace.

* * *

_"We are all of us in this Labyrinth like lilies of the field – we toil not, neither do we spin: and yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of us."_

Rose came awake with a start and blinked under the library's fluorescent lights. She put her hand to her head, her temples pounding, and found that her brow was drenched with sweat. God, she was actually shaking. What _had _she been dreaming? Whatever it was, it had vanished from her memory as quickly as a host of gadflies dispelled beneath the sobering drench of a summer rain, only the vague sting of its remembered terror still remaining to prick at her consciousness and leave her with a sense of disquiet.

She stood up, still trembling, and glanced down at her wrist watch. Ten 'till eight. Oh, darn, she thought. Just enough time to get to the Gallowglass Pub and meet Wilfred and not enough to do anything about her appalling appearance. Well, Langmore's grandson would just have to deal with her unkempt hair and wrinkled clothes. A few things were more important than proper hygiene and Kirsty's life was one such anomaly.

The Gallowglass Pub was several blocks away from campus; she managed to cover the distance in half the time needed, arriving five minutes before her appointment with Wilfred. The gaudy lights that hung from the splintered rafters of the pub's ceiling cast patterns of red and gold upon the polished counter as Rose sat at the bar, stirring the contents of her gin and tonic and wondering whether she was truly awake or simply experiencing one of those strange dreams that sometimes happened upon her once or twice every year, visiting her with their spirit of dread before returning once again to whatever Hell had given them birth. She could not define it precisely, but that same aura of an approaching Something from which her soul both shrank and felt itself compelled to meet now seemed to emanate from every pore of the atmosphere that surrounded her: the smoky air of the bar, the lurid lights above, the dirty wooden walls that seemed to waver as though they ran upon a spool of bad film about to crack and reveal some alien, awful reality…

"Rose?"

She jumped and, turning, found herself face to face with Wilfred Langmore. The corner of his left eye twitched slightly as he met her gaze and the palm of his hand was moist as he took her hand and shook it, his own neuroticism proving an effective blinder to her anxiety.

"Do you want to sit at one of the booths?" he asked, pointing to one in the corner. Clearly he wanted to avoid the company of others.

"Sure," she agreed.

After several minutes of sipping on a Scotch, he at last looked up at her for a second time and, surprisingly, came out with a direct question: "Have you ever heard of Angelique?"

Rose shook her head. "Never. Why, is she another person who solved the Lament Configuration – like Frank?"

"Not exactly." Wilfred hesitated, then added, "I don't know much about her for certain, but the little that I know I'll tell. Perhaps it will give you some sense of why Grandfather is so keen on finding this Box. You see, when he was a young man, he studied abroad in Paris. One night, sitting up past midnight to study for some examination, a young woman knocked upon his door asking him for a light since, she claimed, she was out of candles…"

* * *

The rhythmic sound of metal driving through flesh mingled with the music of the hanging chains all about him, lulling him like a child's nursery song to an almost slumbering state though it was his own flesh that was riveted. When the stakes had started upon him at first, the air had been rent with his cries and pleas: pleas for mercy, pleas for an alternate punishment, pleas for Death – and then the sounds of suffering alone as, in spite of all these, he remained continually riven again and again. But as the iron lancets grew more familiar in their steady motion of retreat and entry, drawing forth from him those warm, roseate rivers of blood and reaching deeper into his inmost parts, he found himself unable to resist the spell of growing gratification that those sensations cast upon him. He could neither turn to the right nor the left, fettered as he was to one of the walls within the mirrored chamber of torment in which he had been imprisoned, but his struggles began to cease and to be replaced with the throes of a being whose nerves – spent at first with the extremity of enduring the uttermost torment – were now convulsing beneath an equally powerful and irresistible surfeit of its opposite.

"An interesting device," Pinhead allowed, standing with Dreamer and Pistonhead beneath the spectacle of what had once been Frank and what was now a mutilated, albeit ecstatic, mass of flesh and bone. The pleas had all died away as though they had been left somewhere behind, running down the iron machinery with the blood and sweat, leaving only the murmur of incoherent desire behind.

"Of course, you have chosen an easy subject for your demonstration," he added. "I can think of no one else who has benefited from our company as much as this man." He hesitated, adding lowly, "And, I hope, his niece."

"It needs a little fine-tuning, my lord," Dreamer admitted. "But I hope to work out the kinks in it soon." She drew upon her cigarette, letting a cloud of smoke issue from between her lips. "What do you think?"

"Frank may remain here," Pinhead replied at last. "Until I choose that he should return to his former place of torment." His ebony eyes flickered for a moment upon the fettered man, both a victim and lover of the death machine in which he was caught. Then the Cenobite turned to depart.

"O, cruel! O, inhuman!" Frank gasped, before dissolving into a paroxysm of laughter. Somewhere inside him, he longed to beg for mercy once again, but he could hardly force enough breath into his lungs to do so. In any event, it would have been in jest – though he hated Pistonhead and Dreamer as they stood by, watching him with gloating eyes. Heaven and Earth, how he hated them…

"Off to see precious little Kirsty, are you?" he managed, as the iron inexorability of the machine sent his nerves reeling once again beneath a fresh wave of agony.

"And if I were," Pinhead replied, pausing at the threshold, his voice redolent with irony. "Then what is that to you?"

"She'll never have you." The sneer in his voice deepened even as the hooks and knives clenched and tightened deeper within him. "She isn't like us – she'll feel nothing but terror for you, just as she did for me. Oh, you and your minions have me for good, but you're as close to Kirsty as you'll ever be."

"Then it's a very good thing that we have you, is it not?" Pinhead nodded towards Dreamer and Pistonhead. "Keep him as long as you wish. I expect that I shall have no reason to return here."

He was met with no other reply than the steady sound of grating iron and the shifting links of chains; it was not even clear that Frank had heard his last words, so undone was he by all that had happened to him and was happening even still. His reflection in the mirrors of the chamber showed him now as once again a flayed, bloodied thing of nightmare – no more human than the things that had wreaked this havoc upon him.

"We are all of us in this Labyrinth like lilies of the field," he murmured. "We toil not, neither do we spin: and yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of us."

He could never have known it, but his words – whispered in the confines of that dungeon chapel of the Labyrinth – were heard even then and remembered by a girl in a dimension wholly opposed to his own and yet connected mysteriously in a manner that neither would fathom until far later in the future when other horrors had been brought to light first…

**Coming Soon: **Kirsty's exploration of the Labyrinth; the tale of Dr. Langmore as related by his grandson; and the deepening mystery behind Rose's nightmares...


	9. The Princess of Hell

_Author's note: _So sorry for the long delay in updating! I hope that you all enjoy this new installment and special acknowledgment goes to **laura101 **for suggesting that I introduce an antagonistic Angelique to Kirsty and **Amy Kane **for being such an encouraging and loyal reader. **  
**

**Chapter Nine**

"Grandfather called out – pleaded with the demon to leave him, to have mercy upon those whom he loved. She only laughed all the more, sinking her long-nailed fingers deep into his shoulder and promising him that she would discover the names of those whom he loved and make them suffer untold agonies if he did not submit at once to her unspeakable lusts." Wilfred Langmore paused and averted his eyes from Rose's breathless gaze. "My grandfather – accepted. But even after performing every lascivious service that she requested, he was still not spared the fate that he had hoped to avoid. He returned to the tenement that he had rented for his stay in Paris, bloodied and exhausted, only to find his wife and month-old infant ripped limb from limb and strewn across his bedchamber. He summoned the police and they dutifully bagged the remains and offered their theories, but my grandfather needed no French inspector to tell him who had done the gruesome deed. It was Angelique – the demon who had pretended to be a helpless young woman, only to reveal herself as a creature whose lust for flesh and blood was insatiable."

Wilfred heaved a shaky breath before continuing. "Grandfather remarried of course, which is why I am here in the first place. But I fear for my own sake as well as his that it was only a prelude to future tragedies. Thirty years later, after his eldest son fathered a child, the same event happened – except this time, the carnage was all the greater. Not only had his son and daughter-in-law both been savagely reduced to mutilated cadavers, but the rotted corpse of his long-dead second wife had been unearthed and likewise cruelly disfigured. It was a gruesome reunion of death that met my grandfather's eyes – but in the very midst of that carnage, his infant grandson lay in his cradle, alive and asleep. Oblivious to the horrors all about him." He paused and then finished his tale with a bright smile: "And that was me, of course!"

Rose stared at him, her face registering incredulity and pity in equal measures. "But – "

"I know," he said with a sigh. "It's all too lurid to be true."

"That's not what I was going to say," Rose replied softly. "I was going to say that I'm very sorry for what happened to you."

"I suppose that I should be thankful, at least, that I never knew them all the way Grandfather did."

"But you've had to live under the shadow of those horrors all your life. It must have been dreadful – especially when you were young."

"Oh, Grandfather has told me these tales so often since I was a child that they hardly seem real anymore," Wilfred said with a rather offhanded shrug. The Scotch had made him both talkative and careless in his movements, though his customarily highstrung nature lingered somewhat in his nervous, twitching fingers as they remained clasped about his dewy glass.

Rose felt her stomach knot at these words. "What sort of a man would tell his grandson such horrible stories repeatedly?" she demanded.

Wilfred shook his head. "You don't understand, Miss St. Aubert. There's a reason why Grandfather read Dante's Inferno to me when I was five years old and made the most Satanic passages in Baudelaire's _Les Fleurs du Mal _my catechism when I was barely able to walk. He was doing more than reminding himself through me of what he suffered. Don't you see? He wants to unlock the Labyrinth the way that Frank Cotton did. He wants to revenge himself upon the Cenobites – and upon Angelique in particular. I'm to be his guide through the Labyrinth."

"And if your grandfather discovers a way to access their world without solving the Lament Configuration…"

Wilfred nodded. "Then they won't come for us immediately, even though we step over the threshold into their kingdom. Which means," he finished. "That not only does Grandfather have a chance of finding Angelique, but you have the chance to find your friend Kirsty. And save her."

* * *

Kirsty ducked beneath the swinging knives and rusted manacles that hung and grated from some dark and lofty ceiling somewhere high above her. She still was searching for some egress – some break or relief in the unending expanse of the Labyrinth through which she travelled – but all she found as she continued on were the same bloodied chains and distant moans that had filled her vision and hearing ever since she had first entered the darkness of that place.

She knew now that her father was not a prisoner of the Labyrinth. The question that had tormented her ever since the fateful night of Frank's second death – that night upon which she had beheld the skinless remains of her father at the feet of his mad, gloating brother only moments before he too was reduced to the same state – had now been laid to rest. Ironically, however, this new peace had been purchased at the cost of her own freedom: she had proven that her father's soul was safe only to trap her own spirit within the corridors of the Labyrinth.

A sound from somewhere ahead caused her to pause in her steps, though she could not immediately perceive a threat.

"Who's there?" she called out, attempting with little hope to hide the fear that she felt. One might have thought that the endless visions of flayed flesh and the silent, inhuman ministers of pain would have numbed her to any further feelings of terror. But any soul familiar with the strength of such sights will know that one can never look upon an object of sublime Horror and feel nothing stir within his breast. Either the heart will quicken and revolt or it will hunger. There is no other way.

"Kirsty." It was a woman's voice that echoed towards her and a woman's face that met her searching eyes as, out of the shadows, the source of the sound that had so startled began to come slowly towards her. But the eyes that seemed to smile at her, soulless and devastatingly lovely, had nothing human in them: even the endless turning of the mute torture pillars with their skewered, bleeding burdens seemed more merciful than the intelligence that shone from those eyes.

"Who_ are_ you?" Kirsty whispered.

"I'm the one who will pull your dripping heart out from your breast, but not before you have seen me harrow the souls of all those you love most." Before Kirsty could reply, the woman was at her throat, squeezing the tender flesh there between fingers as cold and elegant as steel pincers. "Who shall it be first, I wonder?" She paused and then murmured, "Perhaps…Rose St. Aubert?"

"Fuck you." Kirsty managed to pull away, shaken by the woman's ability to summon that name seemingly out of thin air. Was her mind so easy to read, even for a demon? Or especially? She shuddered at the thought.

"Not afraid yet?" The woman smiled. "Maybe a lesson is needed first in where my talents lie."

A blinding pain, the feeling of wetness across her cheeks, and Kirsty saw the woman bring her long nails away, fresh blood dripping from their ends. The woman's expression was gloating, but the sensation that Kirsty felt was less fear than rage. She brought her fist into the woman's face, surprising a font of blood from out of that pale, mocking face.

For a moment, the woman gazed at her in silent stupefaction like a wounded child: the blood flowing from her face, as though she could not believe that she – a deliverer of pain – had tasted her first lesson in it at the hands of it a mere girl. The look of startled suffering caused the beauty in her features to somehow deepen for a moment, so that the cruelty that had displaced it was now subverted by the swollen lip and astonished gleam that lit the dark eyes.

Too soon, the enchantment of the moment was exhausted. Kirsty felt herself flung several yards back, falling hard upon the stone floor amongst the greasy leftovers of some recent victim. The woman was upon her in an instant, her two fingers poised over the girl's eyes, ready to snuff their light out forever. Kirsty knew that death was an impossibility in this nightmare world, but doubted that any of the other agonies that the human body could endure were so inconceivable.

"Can you imagine what it would be like?" the woman whispered, as though reading her mind. "To be blind for an eternity – here, amongst us? To still have your nerves primed and ready for every sensation that can be visited upon them, but unable to see what the next one will be? Ah, are those tears I see? Why, you should be grateful for the gift I am offering you – never again will these eyes have to endure the light of the sun, the face of a friend, all of those transient joys that fall so quickly to dust. You should thank me for this gift of darkness, Kirsty."

Again, the twin, upraised fingers levelled towards her eyes and Kirsty readied herself for the shock of pain and then the eternal night. But at that moment of ultimate horror, she heard a voice, deep and commanding, speak:

"Angelique – those eyes are not for you to steal. Release the girl or I shall have you suffer as much as the Labyrinth's slaves."

Both the she-demon Angelique and the girl Kirsty raised their gazes to see who it was who spoke, though both already knew before their glances settled upon the glittering pins fixed within the pallid flesh and the eyes of ebony.

"Kirsty," said the Lord of the Cenobites, holding out his leather-gauntleted hand though his features remained unmoving and emotionless as ever. "Come to my side. You have nothing to fear any longer. From her."


End file.
